Museumgoers Wonder: Why Doesn’t the Whale Fall?

By STUART MILLER

From right, Roman Pacheco and his cousins visiting from Ecuador, Nancy and Marco Pacheco, look up at the massive blue whale suspended from the ceiling of the Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

It is one of the biggest attractions — literally — at one of New York City’s most famous destinations: the 94-foot-long blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History. Untold numbers gaze in awe every day at the 21,000-pound creature poised majestically in midair above the Hall of Ocean Life.

They point and take photos. But how many visitors have pondered a basic question: What keeps the hulking whale “afloat”?

“I hadn’t even considered it,” said Ian Mark, 40, visiting recently from Scotland with his daughter, Sarah, 7.

“I didn’t think about it,” said Chris Witkowski, 30, from Jacksonville, Fla. “It is so massive, so that’s a good question.”

Gianina Arana, 27, visiting from Colombia, said the room’s immersive atmosphere played a role. The false skylights are backlit with blue bulbs and have projectors and mirrors behind them to give the impression, when you look up past the whale, that you are looking out of the ocean at the sky. “You feel like you’re part of the ocean, and so of course the whale is there,” she said. “That’s the magic of it.”

Spotify Shoots Down Band’s Silent Album Fundraising Hack

Vulfpeck would’ve used ‘Sleepify’ royalties to fund a free tour
WRITTEN BY John Surico

Vulfpeck wanted to go on tour this fall, but didn’t want to charge their fans admission. So the funk group releasedSleepify, a Spotify exclusive comprising 10 tracks filled with absolutely no sound (alternately, as band leader Jack Stratton describes it above: “the most silent album ever recorded”). The March LP was an ingenious back door into the streaming service’s royalty system, designed to gather all of those precious half-cents into a pot large enough to send the Ann Arbor, Michigan crew on the road. But that won’t be happening now. According to Hypebot, Spotify has removed Sleepify from its registry.

The quartet was supposedly on track to raise $20,000 via the quiet release. Very early on,Rolling Stonereported that 120,000 streams had already been recorded — presumably many fans heeded Stratton’s advice of putting the album on repeat while they slept at night. Back then, Spotify seemed fine with it, and even hit back with a playful dash of criticism. “This is a clever stunt, but we prefer Vulfpeck’s earlier albums. Sleepify seems derivative of John Cage’s work,” a spokesperson had told Digiday, referencing the revered experimental composer behind the music-less song “4’33.”

Asteroids cause dozens of nuclear-scale blasts in Earth’s atmosphere

Asteroids caused 26 nuclear-scale explosions in the Earth’s atmosphere between 2000 and 2013, a new report reveals.

Some were more powerful – in one case, dozens of times stronger – than the atom bomb blast that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 with an energy yield equivalent to 16 kilotons of TNT.

Most occurred too high in the atmosphere to cause any serious damage on the ground. But the evidence was a sobering reminder of how vulnerable the Earth was to the threat from space, scientists said.

The impacts were recorded by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation, which operates a global network of sensors set up to detect nuclear weapon detonations. None of the asteroids were picked up or tracked in advance by any space- or Earth-based observatory.

The former astronaut Ed Lu, speaking about the data at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, said: “While most large asteroids with the potential to destroy an entire country or continent have been detected, less than 10,000 of the more than a million dangerous asteroids with the potential to destroy an entire major metropolitan area have been found by all existing space or terrestrially operated observatories.”

Taller! Faster! Scarier! Best new extreme attractions

If you’re afraid of heights, you may want to stay indoors this summer. This is the year attractions are pushing and elbowing for the titles of world’s tallest, fastest, steepest, wettest … you name it. Check out our 10 “most extreme” new attractions for 2014, and start planning a trip to get your adrenaline flowing.

New Jersey’s Six Flags Great Adventure already has the world’s tallest roller coaster — Kingda Ka topping 456 feet. So their engineers decided to strap another ride to the coaster’s superstructure. Billed as the world’s tallest drop tower that’s part of a coaster, Zumanjaro: Drop of Doom takes riders to heights of 415 feet before dropping them back down at 90 mph. Scheduled to open this spring.

Opening this spring, the tallest, free-standing drop tower in North America is Falcon’s Fury — 335 feet tall and dropping riders at 60 mph. At the pinnacle of the tower, seats pivot 90° to point guests toward the ground face-down, just like the attack dive of its namesake bird of prey. USA TODAY Travel will have an exclusive look — including a video from the ride — April 25, so come back to this space!

Indictment Details How to Forge a Masterpiece

One of the Seagram murals by Mark Rothko. Federal prosecutors say Pei-Shen Qian copied him.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

The painting caught Pei-Shen Qian’s eye, but it was the price that affected him deeply.

Mr. Qian, browsing in a booth at a Manhattan art show a decade ago, had stumbled across his own work: a forgery of a modern masterpiece that he had recently completed. He had sold it for just a few hundred dollars, to a man prosecutors now say was Mr. Qian’s co-conspirator in a long-running, $33 million art swindle, whose success stemmed in large measure from Mr. Qian’s skill.

The painter’s surprise encounter with his own handiwork, offered for sale at a price “far in excess” of what he had earned, prompted Mr. Qian to raise the price he charged for his forgeries, from several hundred to several thousand dollars, according to a federal fraud and money laundering indictment unsealed on Monday. But Mr. Qian, who produced the counterfeit masterworks in the garage of his home in Woodhaven, Queens, still received only a tiny fraction of the money his three co-conspirators netted in the scheme.

The case, which first came to light last year, upended the art world, where many dealers, collectors and experts were duped by Mr. Qian’s deft forgeries of Abstract Expressionist masters — painters like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell — and by the actions of two largely unknown art dealers.

Well, the plug is no longer totally pulled The director staged a reading last night at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles that featured Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth, Kurt Russell, James Parks, Amber Tamblyn, Michael Madsen, Denis Menochet, James Remar, Walton Goggins and Bruce Dern. The performance of the five-act western epic took 3.5 hours, and Tarantino told the crowd that re-writes are coming as the project moves forward…possibly all the way to the big screen.

Great footage of the SpaceX reusable rocket

This footage released by SpaceX shows the first test flight of the Falcon 9 reusable (F9R) rocket prototype. The video was recorded using a drone and shows the rocket taking off from its launch pad, rising to 820 feet, hovering, and landing safely back at its test facility in Texas.

Carter gained the support of Nelson Mandela and Bob Dylan, and his story was told in the 1999 Denzel Washington film ‘The Hurricane.’

By Steve Chawkins

Former boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter holds up the writ of habeas corpus that freed him from prison, during a news conference held in Sacramento, Calif., in 2004. Carter, who spent almost 20 years in jail after twice being convicted of a triple murder he denied committing, has died at his home in Toronto at 76. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press / January 29, 2004)

When Rubin “Hurricane” Carter was at his best as a boxer, it would have been impossible to foresee Nelson Mandela or Bob Dylan doing him any favors.

With his fearsome, drop-dead glare, precisely cut goatee and glistening, shaved head, Carter was violent and swaggering, a white racist’s caricature of a dangerous black man.

Talking to sportswriter Milton Gross for a 1964 story in the Saturday Evening Post, Carter made a widely publicized joking remark about killing cops in Harlem. At a weigh-in before a December 1963 fight against Emile Griffith, he chided his opponent by declaring: “You talk like a champ but you fight like a woman who deep down wants to be raped!”

Watch: William S. Burroughs Has a Gun

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) was not inclined to share the frame. He made exceptions for things he adored, including cigarettes, cats, guns, and pretty much anything that connoted or denoted danger. Artist Kate Simon photographed the Beat writer over two decades, from 1975 to 1995, and an exhibition of her portraits is on view through May 9 at the London shop of Nick Knight‘s Showstudio.

Led Zeppelin I

The popular formula in England in this, the aftermath era of such successful British bluesmen as Cream and John Mayall, seems to be: add, to an excellent guitarist who, since leaving the Yardbirds and/or Mayall, has become a minor musical deity, a competent rhythm section and pretty soul-belter who can do a good spade imitation. The latest of the British blues groups so conceived offers little that its twin, the Jeff Beck Group, didn’t say as well or better three months ago, and the excesses of the Beck group’s Truth album (most notably its self-indulgence and restrictedness), are fully in evidence on Led Zeppelin’s debut album.

Jimmy Page, around whom the Zeppelin revolves, is, admittedly, an extraordinarily proficient blues guitarist and explorer of his instrument’s electronic capabilities. Unfortunately, he is also a very limited producer and a writer of weak, unimaginative songs, and the Zeppelin album suffers from his having both produced it and written most of it (alone or in combination with his accomplices in the group).

KFC CHICKEN CORSAGE BEING SOLD JUST IN TIME FOR PROM SEASON

LOUISVILLE, Ky., April 14 (UPI) — As part of a partnership between KFC and Nanz and Kraft Florists, prom-goers who want to bring their date something special now have the chance to surprise them with a chicken corsage.According to Nanz and Kraft, the corsage will “will make your date’s eyes light up and her mouth water.”Only 100 chicken corsages are available and the store has already sold 15 of them, according to the New York Daily News. “Just like the last piece of chicken in the bucket, when they’re gone, they’re gone.”

Watch KISS Turn ‘The Tonight Show’ Into the 1976 ‘Destroyer’ Tour

“This is a profound moment for all of us,” Paul Stanley told the crowd at the Barclays Center on Thursday night. After almost 40 years playing together, his band, KISS, had been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside Nirvana, Hall & Oates, Linda Ronstadt, Cat Stevens, and the E Street Band. But, while Dave Grohl, Joan Jett, and others took the stage as performers, KISS did not. The pop-metal legends did, however, smear on their makeup and strap on their instruments for one high-profile gig this week: On Friday, KISS reunited to appear on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon.

After a blaring introduction from Fallon himself, KISS conquered the NBC studio as if it was 1976 all over again. Tongues wagging and guitars shredding, the pyrotechnic-loving foursome played Destroyer cut “King of the Night Time World” for the telecast, and played “Black Diamond,” “Deuce,” and a mashup of “Hotter Than Hell” and “Firehouse” as web-only exclusives. Watch “King of the Night Time World” above and find the other clips below.

How ‘Battlestar Galactica’ explains Heartbleed

Here’s the latest on Heartbleed: The critical Internet vulnerability doesn’t just affect Web services, but also extends to routers and networking hardware. Yes, that means that a hacker who gains access to a vulnerable router might be able to grab information from said router and use it against you — that is, unless your equipment is too old to be affected by the bug.

For anyone who’s watched Battlestar Galactica, this might sound familiar. In the opening hours of the Second Cylon War, the Galactica was among the humans’ few surviving warships after a crippling surprise attack by invading robots. Many of the fleet’s other battlestars were caught in a Pearl Harbor-like situation: disabled in spacedock, then mercilessly destroyed.

The ships were crippled by a devastating electronic attack that took advantage of a flaw in the Command Navigation Program, the operating system on which the fleet relied. The fleet’s networked computers allowed the hack to spread, shutting down systems everywhere. With their vessels offline, the Colonial fleet proved helpless against the onslaught. Their over-dependence on technology led to their defeat. But Galactica, being a much older battlestar, escaped. The CNP was never installed on its computers, nor were its computers ever networked. Galactica’s second-generation fighter craft were similarly behind the times — but in a head-to-head fight with the Cylons, this proved to be an advantage. Electronic warfare techniques didn’t work against them.

Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won’t commit to.

“I give it a few seconds — not even minutes — and then I’m moving again,” says Handscombe, a 35-year-old graduate student in creative writing at American University.

“It’s like your eyes are passing over the words but you’re not taking in what they say,” she confessed. “When I realize what’s happening, I have to go back and read again and again.”

To cognitive neuroscientists, Handscombe’s experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia.

“I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing,” said Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.”

Exclusive trailer: Preview the book ‘Dorothy Must Die’

That’s the idea behind a new young-adult book, anyway — and I think it’s one that might prompt teens (and their parents) to take another plunge into the land of Oz.

In her dark new novel, Dorothy Must Die, Danielle Paige re-imagines the fantasy landscape we grew up with. Her world paints the Scarecrow as a character who “conducts inhumane experiments on winged monkeys,” the Tin Man as a trained killer, the Cowardly Lion as a “monster out for blood” and Dorothy as a power-hungry woman who must be stopped.

NBC Bay Area found four of the targeted Smart cars between Sunday night and Monday morning. Two were found in the Bernal Heights neighborhood on Anderson Street, and another was found a bit south on Sweeny and Bowdoin streets, closer to the Portola district. They were either sitting on their headlights, rear bumpers high in the air, or vice versa.

A fourth Smart car — a small white one with a faded “Obama-Biden” bumper sticker — was discovered Monday about 9 a.m. at Coso and Prospect avenues between the Mission District and Bernal Heights. Shelley Gallivan was babysitting her friend’s Smart car after it was left to her by her late father, and was shocked to find it flipped on its right side.

The Best F*cking Article You’ll Read Today: Profanity in Rap Lyrics Since 1985

Here we see the Geto Boys and Scarface in the top two spots. For those unfamiliar with the group, the Ge

Flashback to the Bronx in 1973. DJ Kool Herc and MC Coke La Rock are busy laying the groundwork for what will become one of the most popular music genres in the world: Hip-Hop. La Rock, the original MC, initially performed his raps out of view of the audience. This peculiar tactic left audiences scratching their heads, curious about the identity of their favorite local performer.

It is quite remarkable how much hip-hop has changed since those early days more than 40 years ago. Today, the best MCs are more than just popular – they are pop culture superstars. For them, there is no hiding from the audience. Everything they do or say is visible to the public. This intense exposure is magnified when it comes to the distribution of their music. Eminem, the best-selling hip-hop artist of all time, has sold more than 100-million albums worldwide. That puts him in the sales realm of classic artists like Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Rod Stewart, Prince and many more. The massive influence wielded by rap mega-stars is undeniable.

As we all know, a common ingredient in many rap lyrics is shameless profanity. No word is off limits. With f-bombs and assorted slurs streaming through popular music, it’s no shock that some people are up in arms against rap. As mentioned before, these artists reach a huge audience. Is it appropriate for them to be spitting profanity-laced lyrics to the world? This study won’t be answering any questions of morality, but it should give others some fuel to form their own opinions.

This Time, Jim Jarmusch Is Kissing Vampires

The filmmaker Jim Jarmusch is old school. He writes all his scripts out by hand and then dictates them to a typist. Ideas are jotted down in small, color-coordinated notebooks and, despite the presence of an iPad and iPhone in his life, he doesn’t have email. “I don’t have enough time as it is to read a book or make music, or see my friends,” he said. “People don’t believe me, too. They think I’m just saying that because I don’t want to give it to them. But no, I do not have email.”

So his interest in vampires, the subject of his latest movie, “Only Lovers Left Alive,” is hardly modish: He hasn’t seen “Twilight” or “True Blood” or read Anne Rice, but can recount the origin of one of the first English vampire stories, which dates to around 1816. His film, opening April 11, stars Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton as Adam and Eve, an ur-cool bloodsucking couple whose love spans centuries and continents — he lives in crumbling Detroit; she in seedy, tangled Tangier. They’re united as much by their creative and literary appetites — he’s a musician, she’s a reader — as by their darker urges. In some ways, Mr. Jarmusch said, it’s quite a personal film.

Frankie Knuckles, house music ‘godfather,’ dead at 59

by Greg Kot

In Chicago, Frankie Knuckles was called the “godfather,” not because of any underworld connections, but because he helped build house – a style of Chicago dance music that revolutionized club culture in the ‘70s and ‘80s and still resonates around the world today.

In addition to developing the sound and culture of house music, Knuckles would go on to mix records by major artists such as Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson and Depeche Mode.

Knuckles learned his craft as a club DJ in New York City, then moved to Chicago in the late ‘70s and developed a reputation as one of the city’s most influential dance-music tastemakers. He arrived in Chicago just as disco was losing steam. For many, disco literally went up in flames between games of a Chicago White Sox double header at Comiskey Park, when radio deejay Steve Dahl blew up hundreds of disco albums.

“I witnessed that caper that Steve Dahl pulled at Disco Demolition Night and it didn’t mean a thing to me or my crowd,” Knuckles told the Tribune. “But it scared the record companies, so they stopped signing disco artists and making disco records. So we created our own thing in Chicago to fill the gap.”

Knuckles was mentored by the renowned DJ Larry Levan in the early ‘70s while in New York. “We would spend entire afternoons working up ideas on how to present a record so that people would hear it in a new way and fall in love with it,” Knuckles said. “To us it was an art form.”

Hollywood ‘spec script’ is making a comeback

Independent producer Lawrence Grey sold the screenplay for “Section 6” for $1 million after setting off a bidding war between the major studios.

Six months later, in March, he sold the screenplay for “Winter’s Knight” the same way, for the same price.

The sales of the speculatively written properties, both of which Grey will produce, put Hollywood on notice that the “spec script” was on the rebound and reminded some executives of the 1990s, when $1-million-plus spec sales were common.

Movie studios, then flush with money, were pumping out more than 20 films a year and constantly in search of new material. Specs were coveted because they enabled studios to circumvent the often costly and time-consuming development process.

Big sales such as the $3-million purchase of Joe Eszterhas’ “Basic Instinct” and the $1.75-million acquisition of Shane Black’s “The Last Boy Scout” touched off a decade-plus of freewheeling spending.

But as studios stockpiled material, says J.C. Spink, a veteran manager and producer who has worked in the spec market for years, “they were buying so much material that they didn’t make that they began to think, why are we doing this?”